I've done one of the greatest mistakes in my life. I've installed Debian Lenny. When I've installed LXDE my wireless card went off, and the system says the wlan0 is forbidden. How to enable it. It is listed in lspci, but the system doesn't recognizes it.The ndiswrapper doesn't work either! Any help?

Well I moved back to safe haven of Mandriva. It was a travelling back in time. No it is up to Debian. It has no working ndiswrapper module, and I don't undrestand how did I manage to set it up for a short period of time, after that the card has been blocked, and I could not deblock it.
Believe me it was a horrible journey! I felt like a DJ manipulating with 5 DVDs (in Mandriva I use to put 2 DVDs of packages onto HD, and that's it.) I don't know why they just don't want to get out of stone age with synaptic, and the well fashioned repos, which are almost useless. I've posted my previous message from Mepis 6.5 Live, which is also a Debian derivate, and even with the version 8.0 you have to enter the monitor frequencies by hand! No, thanks!

03-15-2009

reed9

It's funny, I feel the same way about rpm based distros as you do about deb. I think apt is so much superior to urpmi. Faster, and way more intuitive for me. I want to shoot myself in the head the length of time it takes just to update the repos in Mandriva, not to mention the obnoxious (in my opinion) way it handles downloading metadata for packages in the GUI manager. I used Mandriva for about a month before leaving it. I'll grant, I prefered it to Fedora, which I couldn't handle for more than a week, or OpenSuse, which lasted about 2 days.

But again, in your case, I think the problem is more that Debian mantains very strict standards of free software, whereas Mandriva One includes a lot of proprietary stuff. Also, did you really need 5 DVDs? I've never installed Debian using more than the basic install CD, and more usually, the netinstall cd.

Ultimately, I prefer Arch Linux and pacman to either of them, though. Fastest, easiest, most sensible package management out there. (And system management.) Though if entering things by hand isn't your cup of tea, you wouldn't care for it.

03-15-2009

waterhead

I think that it is your insistence on using NDISwrapper that is a travel backwards in time!

There are very few instances where you need to use NDISwrapper anymore, as there are Linux drivers for most wireless chips. These drivers are usually compiled into the kernel as modules.I am not very familiar with the Debian kernel, so I don't know if they are compiled into the Debian kernel. And yes, if it is proprietary, then Debian probably won't have it installed by default. This is no different than Fedora, and other distros.

As for the method of installing/updating. I use Fedora and Suse, have have absolutley no problems with installing and updating programs. I find Fedora's YUM easier to use than Apt. And I can easily set up my own local repository, using the createrepo command. Can you do that with your favorite package manager?

03-15-2009

reed9

Quote:

Originally Posted by waterhead

And I can easily set up my own local repository, using the createrepo command. Can you do that with your favorite package manager?

It looks like Arch doesn't actually use packages, like Debian, Fedora or Suse do, but installs from source.

We all have our favourites. I just wanted show that not everybody finds Fedora and Suse package management to be difficult and/or troublesome. It usually boils down to a lack of knowledge. I have never used Arch, so I would find that difficult to use.

03-15-2009

reed9

Despite the .tar.gz ending, those are in fact binary packages, not source. Though they also have a ports like system called ABS (arch build system) for installing from source if you want or need to. And the online user repository uses pkgbuild scripts, similar to Slackware's slackpkg scripts, which build from source. I heartily recommend Arch for intermediate users, it's fantastic.

03-16-2009

minthaka

But you know waterhead, I was really full of expectations toward the Debian: this is grandfather of all .deb distributions, I've expected to have a good and stable system. When I've installed it, the first difficulty was, that I had at least 3 attempts to explain the system that I prefer the 1024x768 resolution, with 85Hz , instead of higher but with less refresh rate. I don't know why.
Then, since I use to use a wide range of softwares, I had to use 5 DVDs indeed. It's not easy to create a HD repository at all. In Mandriva, all you have to do is to put all the .rpm packages in a folder you want and to add this folder with a selector dialog to repositories. Simple and efficient!
In Debians you have a really complicated way. I know how to do that, but it has no sense of doing like that.
For the networking: I could not setup my wificard for unknown reasons, it is a Rtl8180 based card, very well supported, although I need ndiswrapper.
For the display: I could not install the Nvidia driver, downloaded from the vendor's homepage, even if I've installed all the required prerequisites, headers, sources etc.
And as the last thing: I've lost the internet connection after I've installed LXDE environment. It was "forbidden" or disabled, and I could not do anything.

03-16-2009

waterhead

Although I have one Debian based system (64Studio), I am not a Debian master. I do know that you may not have to use NDISwrapper for your wireless. There is a Linux Realtek driver.

There is a report that it didn't work with the rtl8187se wireless, though.

As for the display problems, I would have installed the nVidia driver before trying to tweak the display. As for the nVidia driver not installing, I didn't experience any problems with this. So I can't explain your problems.

I guess Linux purests prefer a distro that they not only can configure their own way, but must configure.;)

As for the 5 DVDs (not CDs) that are available, that does seem like a lot. I assume that contains ALL software available for Debian. You don't need all of them to install the system, just the first one. It even says not to download the other disks unless you know that you need them (how do you know?).

One small thing about Debian that seemed to bug me, was it's insistance on changing the name of "Firefox" to "Iceweasle". No other Linux distro has a problem with Firefox's licensing, not even the squeaky clean Fedora. But Debian developers can't seem to come to terms with it. With such an anal attitude, I won't be installing it again in the future!